Bay of Pigs

Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Security
COPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc.

Bay of Pigs

█ LARRY GILMAN

The Bay of Pigs (Bahía de Cochinos) is a small bay on the southern coast of Cuba that was invaded on April 17, 1961 by approximately 1,400 Cuban exiles organized and armed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The invasion was meant to appear to be an attempt by independent Cuban rebels to overthrow leftist Cuban leader Fidel Castro, but became obviously known as an American project, and confirmed when President John F. Kennedy immediately admitted responsibility when the invasion failed. The Bay of Pigs, as the whole episode came to be known, was a major embarrassment for the United States, which was caught deceiving the United Nations and trying to overthrow by force a government which the U.S. itself had officially recognized and which was not attacking the U.S. One hundred and fourteen invaders and 157 Cuban soldiers were killed and 1,189 invaders were taken prisoner.

Fidel Castro became the leader of Cuba's government when his revolutionary forces overthrew the Batista regime in January, 1959. At first, Washington was not hostile to Castro. President Dwight D. Eisenhower recognized his government a few days after Batista's downfall, and Castro even traveled to Washington to meet with Vice President Richard Nixon (later President Nixon). Nixon decided that Castro could not be relied upon to pursue U.S. interests and began to agitate privately for his removal.

In October, 1959, Eisenhower approved a secret program to depose Castro proposed by the CIA and the State Department. Eisenhower told his advisors that "our hand should not show in anything that is done"—in other words, that the operation should be carried out in such a way that

U.S. responsibility could be plausibly denied. To this end, the CIA gathered, funded, armed, and trained an anti-Castro rebel organization in Florida, the Panama Canal Zone, and Guatemala. The CIA began military training of 300 Cuban expatriates in March of 1960, and in May began broadcasting anti-Castro propaganda over the whole Caribbean from a station on a small, disputed territory named Swan Island. The programs were taped in Miami under CIA control, but claimed to be the voice of an authentic Cuban rebel movement without U.S. ties. In September, addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations, Castro accurately accused the U.S. of operating Radio Swan; the U.S. denied the charge.

In July, 1960, the Cuban fighters of "Brigade 2506"—named for the number of a brigade member killed in an accident—were transferred to a training camp in Guatemala built and run by the CIA.

On November 4, 1960, John Kennedy was elected president. Once in office, Kennedy gave his approval for the training of Brigade 2506 to continue. Like Eisenhower before him, however, Kennedy was adamant that U.S. armed forces should not take part in any effort to overthrow Castro. Not only was the whole operation illegal, any hint of U.S. manipulation would alienate potential supporters of the invasion inside Cuba. U.S. planners hoped that when news of the invasion reached the Cuban populace, an anti-Castro rebellion would arise and cast him out. At the very least, planners believed, the invaders could fight their way overland to the Escambray Mountains, about 100 miles west of the landing zone, and join rebel forces already fighting there.

On April 15, 1961, the first part of the invasion plan was carried out. Eight B-29 bombers supplied by the CIA bombed Cuban military aircraft on the ground at several locations. Later, a B-26 bearing Cuban markings and marked with bullet-holes landed at Miami International Airport. The pilots claimed to be defecting Cuban pilots, the goal being to make the raids on Cuba earlier that morning look like an internal action by defecting Cuban pilots. However, reporters on the scene noted that the plane's machine guns had not been fired and that the plane was not of the type actually used by Cuba. Castro, hearing the reports, commented that even Hollywood would not have tried to film such a feeble story. The goal of the bombings themselves was to destroy the Cuban government's small air force at one stroke, eliminating any call for U.S. air support of Brigade 2506 at the landing site. The raid was not completely successful, however.

Two days later, on April 17, a landing was made at Playa Girón (Girón Beach) in the Bay of Pigs. A small beachhead was quickly achieved by Brigade 2506, but one of their freighter vessels, containing food, fuel, medical equipment, and a ten days' supply of ammunition, was quickly sunk. Combat was heavy around the beachhead as Cuban government forces responded to the attack. The remnants of the Cuban Air Force bombed and strafed the invading forces, as Brigade 2506 had not been supplied with fighter aircraft and President Kennedy categorically refused to allow U.S. fighters to go into combat.

The military situation deteriorated steadily (from the invaders' point of view) over the next 48 hours. On April 18, while the fighting was at its peak, Adlai Stevenson denied to the United Nations, in response to Cuban accusations, that the U.S. was attacking Cuba. Eventually, Kennedy was persuaded to authorize unmarked U.S. fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Essex to provide escort cover for the invasion's B-26 bombers, most of which were now being flown by CIA agents in support of the ground invasion (two-thirds of the Brigade pilots were refusing to fly). The jets from the Essex missed their rendezvous with the B-26s by an hour due to a misunderstanding about time zones; in the subsequent, unescorted bombing raid over Cuba, two B-26s were shot down and four Americans were killed. The fighting ended on April 20, 1961, with the defeat of Brigade 2506.

The project, most analysts would later conclude, had been hopeless from the beginning. Fidel Castro enjoyed wide support in Cuba and had just consolidated a military victory against the Batista regime; a few thousand lightlyarmed invaders could not possibly have taken the island. Furthermore, the idea that the U.S. could keep its role secret had become ridiculous long before the invasion was attempted. The New York Times had run a story on March 17, 1961, predicting a U.S. invasion of Cuba in the coming weeks, and another story on April 7, entitled "Anti-Castro Units Trained to Fight at Florida Bases," which noted that invasion plans were in their final stages. Although the Times had watered down the latter story considerably at President Kennedy's personal request, when Kennedy saw the paper he exclaimed that Castro didn't need spies; all he had to do was read the news. But Castro, and others, did have spies, and the Soviet Union was fairly well-informed of U.S. invasion plans ahead of time.

The costs of the Bay of Pigs were high, and not only in lives lost. In the wake of the invasion, Castro consolidated his regime, supported by public outrage in Cuba over the U.S.-plotted invasion, and concluded a mutual-defense agreement with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union exploited this relationship to get Cuban permission to place ballistic-missile launch sites on Cuban soil. These launch sites, detected by U.S. aerial photography, were the immediate cause of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, generally agreed to have been the closest approach to all-out nuclear war that the world has yet ecountered.

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Bay of Pigs

Bay of Pigs

The Bay of Pigs invasion flowed from a directive signed by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower on March 17, 1960, authorizing the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to begin operations to remove the Castro government from power in Cuba (Kornbluh 1998, p. 269). This quickly evolved into a plan to land an invasion force of some 1,200 Cuban exiles near the city of Trinidad, Cuba, at the foot of the Escambray Mountains. The invasion force, called the Brigade 2506, trained in Central America and by the end of 1960 was making final preparations for the landing.

Meanwhile, however, presidential elections had been held in the United States. Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, lost, and the Democratic candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy, won. The latter might have been expected to cancel the invasion plan, once informed of it, but this would have been difficult for him to do. During the election campaign, he had sharply criticized the Eisenhower-Nixon administration for allowing this Communist foothold to emerge only 90 miles to the south of the United States. Had he canceled the invasion, the Republicans would doubtless have gone public and pointed out that they had had a plan to remove the “foothold,” but Kennedy had abandoned it.

Further, Kennedy quickly developed confidence in Richard Bissell (1910–1994), the CIA’s deputy director for plans, who was masterminding the operation (Wyden 1979, p. 96). Thus, Kennedy let the invasion plan go forward. He did insist, however, that a landing so near the city of Trinidad would be “too spectacular,” and requested that it be moved to a more remote location (Wyden 1979, p. 100). Bissell obligingly moved the site some 70 miles to the west, to the Bay of Pigs (Bahía de Cochinos). This meant, however, that if the invasion failed, the invaders could not melt away into the mountains and become guerrillas, as Bissell had suggested to Kennedy, for the mountains were now far away across impenetrable swamps (Wyden 1979, p. 102).

The invasion force of approximately 1,200 exiles seemed totally inadequate to the task at hand, given that they would face a regular army of 60,000 armed with Soviet tanks and artillery, and backed by a militia force of 100,000. Bissell assured Kennedy, however, that the invasion would spark a massive popular uprising against Fidel Castro. Unfortunately, this assurance was not based on any hard intelligence. Indeed, it turned out to be utterly baseless (Kornbluh 1998, p. 12).

Preparatory air strikes against Cuban airfields, flown by exile and CIA pilots operating from Central America, were quickly revealed to be exactly that and not strikes by defecting Cuban pilots, as the United States claimed. Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965), the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (UN), was deliberately misinformed by the White House, however, and gave a speech in the UN saying the raids had been carried out by defecting Cuban pilots. Outraged when he found out the truth, he complained to Kennedy, who ordered the next day’s air cover to be canceled. Nevertheless, as the CIA’s own report on the operation later stated, this was not “the chief cause of failure” (Kornbluh 1998, p. 12). The chief cause, rather, was the glaring disparity between the numbers of the invading force and the number of defenders. The former never really had a chance. They went ashore in the early morning hours of April 17, 1961, and by 2 p.m. of April 19, facing overwhelming odds, were forced to surrender. In retrospect, that surrender seemed so inevitable that the Bay of Pigs invasion came to be described as that rarest of all things—a perfect failure (Smith 1987, p. 70).

The failure of the United States at the Bay of Pigs had three crucial consequences. First, it solidified Castro in power. Second, seeing that if the United States used its own forces, he would need Soviet support to survive, to persuade Moscow to provide that support, Castro announced on April 16 that Cuba was a “socialist” state and he began to transform it into one, with a system patterned after the Soviet Union. And third, flowing in part from this transformation, Nikita Khrushchev the next year decided to place missiles in Cuba, thus leading to the October missile crisis of 1962.

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Bay of Pigs Invasion

Dictionary of American History
COPYRIGHT 2003 The Gale Group Inc.

BAY OF PIGS INVASION

BAY OF PIGS INVASION (17 April 1961), the abortive attempt by Cuban exiles—organized, financed, and led by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—to overthrow the revolutionary regime of Premier Fidel Castro in Havana. The landing by the 1,453 men of Brigade 2506 on the swampy southwestern coast of Cuba turned within seventy-two hours into a complete disaster as the Castro forces captured 1,179 of the invaders and killed the remaining 274. For the United States and for President John F. Kennedy, who had authorized the operation in his third month in the White House, the Bay of Pigs became a bitter political defeat as well as a monumental failure in a large-scale intelligence enterprise. The invasion led to an increase in Soviet aid to Cuba that climaxed with the installation of nuclear warheads in Cuba in 1962. The Cuban missile crisis that followed was one of the most dangerous moments in post–World War II relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The plans for the Bay of Pigs were conceived by the CIA during 1960, toward the end of the Eisenhower administration, on the theory—proved by events to have been totally erroneous—that a landing by the exiles' brigade would touch off a nationwide uprising against Castro. Kennedy's administration shared the Eisenhower administration's fear of Castro's leftward leanings, and Kennedy authorized the plan shortly after Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev publicly described conflicts in Vietnam and Cuba as "wars of national liberation" that merited Soviet support.

From the mistaken assumption that Cuba would rise against Castro to its poorly managed execution, the entire venture was marked by miscalculation. To prepare for the invasion, the CIA trained the force in secret camps in Guatemala for nearly six months. But long before the landing, it was widely known in the Cuban community in Florida (and, presumably, the information was also available to Castro agents) that such a landing was in the offing. Finally, the invasion failed because Kennedy refused to provide U.S. air support for the brigade. Castro's aircraft easily disposed of the exiles' tiny air force and proceeded to sink the invasion ships and cut down the men holding the Bay of Pigs beachhead. Twenty months later, in December 1962, Castro released the 1,179 Bay of Pigs prisoners in exchange for $53 million worth of medical supplies and other goods raised by private individuals and groups in the United States.

Kennedy came under criticism both from those who believed the invasion never should have taken place and from Cuban exiles, most notably José Miró Cardona, president of the U.S.-based National Revolutionary Council, who blamed the invasion's failure on Kennedy's refusal to authorize air support. The invasion forced the resignation of the CIA director, Allen Dulles, embarrassed the Kennedy administration, and contributed to decades of tension between the United States and Cuba.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Higgins, Trumbull. The Perfect Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs. New York: Norton, 1987.

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Bay of Pigs Invasion

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

Copyright The Columbia University Press

Bay of Pigs Invasion, 1961, an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles, supported by the U.S. government. On Apr. 17, 1961, an armed force of about 1,500 Cuban exiles landed in the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) on the south coast of Cuba. Trained since May, 1960, in Guatemala by members of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the approval of the Eisenhower administration, and supplied with arms by the U.S. government, the rebels intended to foment an insurrection in Cuba and overthrow the Communist regime of Fidel Castro. The Cuban army easily defeated the rebels and by Apr. 20, most were either killed or captured. The invasion provoked anti-U.S. demonstrations in Latin America and Europe and further embittered U.S.-Cuban relations. Poorly planned and executed, the invasion subjected President Kennedy to severe criticism at home. Cuban exile leader José Miró Cardona, president of the U.S.-based National Revolutionary Council, blamed the failure on the CIA and the refusal of Kennedy to authorize air cover for the invasion force, but perhaps more crucial was the fact that the uprising the exiles hoped and needed to spark did not happened. Much later it was revealed that the CIA task force planning the invasion had predicted that the invasion's goals unachievable without U.S. military involvement; it is unclear whether Kennedy or CIA chief Allen Dulles knew of the assessment. In Dec., 1962, Castro released 1,113 captured rebels in exchange for $53 million in food and medicine raised by private donations in the United States.

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Bay of Pigs

Bay of Pigs (April 17, 1961) Unsuccessful effort by Cuban exiles (aided by the USA) to overthrow Fidel Castro by invading Cuba near the Bay of Pigs. About 1500 Cubans, trained, equipped and transported by the US government, were involved. The invasion was badly planned and the Cuban army defeated the exiles within three days. US President John F. Kennedy initially denied US involvement and was later subject to criticism for its failure. See also Cuban Missile Crisis

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